Representatives from state governments and the financial and hospital industries testified recently that they spend too much time working to comply with a cavalcade of duplicative, outdated or contradictory federal rules, although they stopped short of rejecting regulation in principle.

At the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee’s sparsely attended but provocatively titled hearing, “Regulatory Divergence: Failure of the Administrative State,” officials espoused the need for federal agencies to adopt a unified cross-agency framework for developing regulations, rather than the “siloed” fashion in which rules are typically crafted.

“We’re finding that 43 percent of our resources within compliance and cybersecurity are utilized to reach federal compliance,” said James “Bo” Reese, president of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers and the CIO in Oklahoma’s Office of Management and Enterprise Services. “We’re all for federal compliance, but the challenge is we spend so much time, and duplicative time because of multiple audits, the same ones over and over and with differences that we have to go out and map and find the least common denominator across them.”

Here’s an interesting trivia question for all you acquisition lovers in the government: How many rules did the Federal Acquisition Regulations Council finalize during the first year of the Trump administration?

Give it some thought. Did the FAR Council make any changes from Jan. 20 to Dec. 31, 2017?

The answer is: the FAR Council issued one final rule for the entire year.

The sheer number of laws, regulations, and policies that apply to the defense acquisition process is staggering.

The Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), which governs how the federal government buys goods and services, is a 2,000-page document. On top of that is the 1,500-page Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS), which applies specifically to purchases by the Department of Defense (DoD). In addition to all those regulations are federal statutes and DoD internal policies that govern the acquisition process. For contracting officers, that means determining the applicability of hundreds of regulations, in addition to hundreds of laws and policies, to make a purchase.

Many of these laws, regulations, and policies are outdated, but no one has taken the time to remove or update them. According to a 2017 analysis by Deloitte, over two-thirds of all federal regulations on the books have never been updated since they were created. While each outdated regulation alone may not be a significant problem, in the aggregate those regulations can pose an enormous administrative burden. Many in the defense acquisition workforce have argued that assessing and complying with the large number of regulations slows down the acquisition process, wasting time, money, and energy that could be better spent elsewhere. Additionally, the complexity and cost of compliance creates a barrier to entry for small businesses that may wish to engage in business with DoD but cannot afford the lawyers and compliance officers necessary for the job.

The 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) established the Section 809 Panel to address fundamental problems with how the Defense Department acquires goods and services to support its warfighters.

Starting in 2008, whenever new legislation or regulation debuted that affected government contracting, it was written on a band-aid and stuck to a golf ball. It’s 10 times bigger now.

It recently released an interim report and supplement advocating in broad strokes for a host of improvements to the acquisition system to better streamline the process and increase industry offerings to the government.

In meeting with over 200 government and industry representatives, the interim report found that the acquisition system creates obstacles that make it unattractive for small and large businesses alike to offer their goods and services to the government. It explained that “the United States’ ability to maintain technological, military and economic superiority is being challenged,” as our adversaries are recognizing vulnerabilities in our forces and the ability to respond through modernization.

Thus, the Pentagon’s acquisition procedures must be improved to achieve “a degree of agility that DoD is not currently able to deliver,” it said.

To achieve this agility, the interim report recommended several improvements.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced that it will be eliminating numerous paperwork requirements for federal agencies.

The announcement was made in a memo issued this week in which OMB director Mick Mulvaney said that the Trump Administration is continuing its effort to make government more efficient.

“In support of the President’s Management Agenda and the belief that the Federal Government can – and should – operate more effectively and efficiently, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is taking action to identify low-value, duplicative, and obsolete activities that can be ended,” wrote Mulvaney in the memo.

He noted, however, that only reporting requirements are being eliminated and said that care is still required and expected. “I don’t think anybody perceives this as license to start goofing off again,” said Mulvaney.